2012-06-02

Kitchen Renovation - Part 2

Since we've moved into our house the kitchen has seen an appliance upgrade and we have replaced those dingy curtains below the sink with actual doors!

My only gripe with the kitchen is the 8x10 area on the other side of the peninsula. Used only as access to the laundry area (far left of pic below), garage (door on left), to the outside deck (double doors on the right) and some hooks for jackets the space is under utilized.

When I recently received FREE cabinets from my mum's house I began to layout a new arrangement for our kitchen (see below). The red lines represent the current location of the peninsula and the super deep pantry. I have already removed the double doors leading out to the deck and made room for the new cabinets. The proposed pantry will be doubled in length and will be less deep and have better means of organization. The blue lines represent a future clothing/toy organization system (TBD). I have already added a couple of the new wall cabinets to the laundry area to help clean up it's clutter. The new island will offer concealed trash and possibly recycling bins (finally), two bar stools and a couple base cabinets at the ends. While we lose just a bit of upper cabinets we gain much more pantry space and lower cabinet space!

Here is a snapshot from the last phase when I infilled the double door. When visitors are over it's inevitable that at some point at least one or two people are on the other side of the peninsula and all visual connection is lost due to that large suspended cabinet/bulkhead.

Knowing that any demo work of drywall will make and send dust to the far corners of my house I created my own little bubble to work within. I ran some string between a few finish nails that I tacked into the edge of the wall/ceiling. Easy patching and good holding strength. Then I taped some 2mil plastic over the string/floor/cabinet/countertop. When demolition was complete I unfastened the top and roll the entire thing up into a ball removing 99.9% of the construction debris with it.

I'm excited to see two electrical circuits available for me to chose from for the new pendant lights that will go over the island.

For now the demo'd pieces find a temporary home on my back deck. I will reuse 100% of the base cabinets in the basement for my future kitchenette/wine cellar but I haven't decided on the uppers yet.

It certainly changes the feel of the space now that everything is wide open. Since I failed to take a good before comparison photo (doh!) I turned to photoshop.

Next step will be to remove some of the wall cabinets and all of the base cabinets. Then I can start moving in the new!